As I worked my way through the opinion pages of the Washington Post and New York Times this morning, I was struck by how blunt and harsh the tone has become toward the president. Michael Wolff’s forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury,” has given permission to a lot of people to say what folks like me have been saying since before the inauguration, which is that Trump is not fit to serve as president and that our nation’s highest priority must be to remove him from office. Joe Scarborough actually knows the president on a personal level, and he honestly is not convinced that Trump can read. He refers to Trump’s presidency as “indefensible,” which it is, and endorses the view floated by Steve Bannon that he has committed treason, which is a stretch.
Americans will be left with the inescapable conclusion that the president is not capable of fulfilling his duties as commander in chief.
The GOP’s defense of this indefensible president appears even more preposterous following Wolff’s revelation, in his new book, “Fire and Fury,” of former adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s observation that members of Trump’s team, including his son, committed nothing less than treason.
Most of all, Scarborough wants to shame the Republicans into removing their own “unstable” president from office
We are a nation that spent the past 100 years inventing the modern age, winning World War I, defeating Hitler and winning World War II, and liberating half of Europe by beating the Soviets in the Cold War. But today we find ourselves dangerously adrift at home and disconnected from the allies abroad that made so many of those triumphs possible. The world wonders how the United States will survive Donald Trump. And I ask, what will finally move Republicans to deliver a non-negotiable ultimatum to this unstable president? Will they dare place their country’s interests above their own political fears? Or will they move to end this American tragedy only when there is nothing left to lose?
Michelle Goldberg makes many of the same points, referring to the Trump administration as “a sick travesty.”
But most of all, the book confirms what is already widely understood — not just that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency, but that everyone around him knows it.
According to Wolff, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, called Trump an “idiot.” (So did the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, though he used an obscenity first.) Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his boss’s intelligence to excrement. The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he’s a “dope.” It has already been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” which he has pointedly refused to deny.
And yet these people continue to either prop up or defend this sick travesty of a presidency.
Wolff has struck a chord that resonates by emphasizing that everyone he talked to in the West Wing of the White House over the last year agrees that Trump is “like a child” and that every single one of them has come to the conclusion that Trump simply cannot function in the job. In other words, Bannon may have expressed himself with the most colorful language but his assessment of the president is the strong consensus view among the people who work closely with him.
Removing a president is no small thing, and I understand that people will only do it with great reluctance. Based on Wolff’s reporting, it should be done by Trump’s own cabinet based on the 25th amendment. Essentially, if they all agree he cannot do the job, they should do their constitutional duty and take the politics of an impeachment trial out of it. They don’t need to wait to see what Special Counsel Bob Mueller has to say because it’s not the criminality that is the primary problem at the moment. It’s the president’s lack of executive function and his apparent diminished capacity that is of the most urgent concern. Events in the world won’t wait. The Korean Peninsula could erupt in a nuclear confrontation any day and the Iranian government is being challenged in the streets. The Saudi regime is in a period of stress and turmoil, and the Israeli government is busily trying to bury the two-state solution for good. We’re entering a period of great consequence, like 1979 or 1989, and we’ll have to live with the consequences that are made by the White House for decades to come.
There’s not much more the media can do than they’ve already done. They’ve exposed Trump and his inability to serve as president. It’s up to the people in a position to solve this problem to solve it.
Trump clearly did not commit treason in the legal sense, which is clearly defined and incredibly difficult to actually do outside an actual ongoing war.
But he just as clearly did commit treason in the colloquial sense that most people understand it, collaborating with a hostile foreign government to attack our country’s vital institutions of government.
“But he just as clearly did commit treason in the colloquial sense that most people understand it, collaborating with a hostile foreign government to attack our country’s vital institutions of government.”
Speaking as a lawyer, I agree it may not “legally” be “treason,” but it is in every other sense of the word. I call it a “high crime” meriting impeachment and removal.
“The cover-up not the crime,” etc….
Stepping back from the story far enough to see it as a Russian attack against the United States, in which Trump was a willing collaborator, makes the stench of treason undeniable. I agree that a criminal charge of treason is highly unlikely to stick, but we know whose side Trump took and it wasn’t America’s.
That consensus train seems to be pulling into the station that we have a president in office who in many many ways is not capable of performing his duties.
And so the question before the Rep Congress is no longer should they move forward to remove him but how?
The Rep have worn through their support blankie for him, made fools of themselves in December in front of the cameras during the tax bill signing, obstructed in every way possible, and yet every single day bucketloads of new damning information is unloaded. Denial is not working.
So, now they face the question, what is worse, Trump? or the Congress that won’t stand up to his failures and remove him?
And yet I fear that there will be no consequences to the GOP, electorally or otherwise, for propping up Trump. It will all vanish down the memory hole.
I think about that every day. And now that the GOP has trained its supporters to think of politics as some kind of ongoing National Enquirer storyline that half of the Country cannot see any bigger stories…like the theft of our election system, global standing and climate change.
We need a re set button for denialists.
And yet I fear that there will be no consequences to the GOP, electorally or otherwise, for propping up Trump. It will all vanish down the memory hole.
Of course. After all, even Democrats have already vanished C- Augustus down the memory hole. I mean scum like David Frum, Bill Kristol and Max Boot are part of #TheResistance now.
I didn’t realize Democrats had the power to stop Republicans from opposing Trump.
Remember kids, only the Democratic Party has any agency, ever.
But the democrat party is more neoliberal.
And neocentrist.
Same snark every time.It’s not getting any funnier.
I’m not fucking laughing.
I’m not laughing either. If anything, a lot of what happens in the blogs and what I do see on Twitter pisses me off worse than all the bullshit the wingnuts pull on a daily basis. At least I understand what’s wrong with the wingnuts, as decades of conspiracy theories and hate from the days of talk radio to the present have left that bunch demented. Not sure what the excuse is for those on the left who spout their own toxic stew of stupidity.
Under the circumstances, if the circular firing squad that appears endemic to what passes for a left blogosphere cannot be contained, then at the very least those perpetrating said firing squad should be mocked mercilessly. Containment does not appear to be an option, so mock away and be merciless.
Got it. And there’s no such thing as neoliberalism, and even if there were it would have nothing to do with the present state of the Democratic Party, or the country, or the world. And Naomi Klein is just another member of the circular firing squad, along with The Guardian.
Look guys, I can understand not wanting to talk about it right now. It is a bit OT. But YOU are the ones that keep bringing it up. I think it’s called “denial”.
Here’s the thing…an honest discussion of neoliberal theory might be of some use, but that is not what happens on blogs like this one. Neoliberal and neoliberalism are used as pejorative terms, and I have learned the hard way that it is best not to trust the intentions of those who bandy about these words. Now if I find that there is a legitimate scholar who really knows her or his stuff giving a talk on neoliberalism, I will gladly attend and gladly ask questions. Basically, even though I am not a political economist by any stretch of the imagination, I have read some of the very basic scholarly work (both critical and favorable) about neoliberalism and find conversations about it on this blog frustrating for the reasons I mentioned before. My scholarly knowledge may be minimal, but it is just enough to suss out that “neoliberalism” is badly misused to the point of being rendered meaningless.
Regrettably, too much “knowledge” about the topic seems to come from opinion pieces in the popular press (as much as I may like to glance at the Guardian, at the end of the day, an opinion piece is merely an opinion piece and no more), and too often those opinion pieces do little more than muddy the waters. So when I see yet another comment that is just patently stupid (e.g., Candidate X is just another neoliberal – which is slightly more sophisticated than poopy-head, I suppose), I see little choice but either to mock or to just shut down and disengage. But I see little reason for any good faith attempt at dialog about neoliberalism here at BT unless or until I actually see some clear-headed discussion of a somewhat complex topic, and that means demonstrating to me that one has done more than read a few columns in The Guardian or Naomi Klein. I seriously doubt that will ever happen given the history of this blog to this point.
To sum up, what you call denial I call simply being fed up. And I have been fed up for quite some time now. Friendly advice: avoid using technical terms as pejoratives in the future if you wish to actually engage me in any sort of meaningful conversation. I no longer play nice with those who fail to do so.
Calling the Democratic Party the “democrat” party is the tell that you are an uninformed rightwinger.
Unless, of course, it’s sarcasm.
Right? Context is everything.
Even I knew it was sarcasm. Just bad sarcasm.
I thought it pretty good sarcasm!
. . . for a tuneup.
Suggest you check your owner’s manual for routine maintenance schedule.
Successful politics is about tactical alliances with people you don’t like or agree with. Always has been, always will be. People are too varied for it to ever be otherwise.
If you need Frum, Boot and Bill Kristol to help get rid of Trump I fear for such a movement. All three of them helped bring about Trump.
The “you” in Phil Perspective’s statement here speaks volumes.
Phil, we need to be in a movement with you in order to defeat the toxic Trump movement, which I heartily agree with you was built by the serial mendacities and immoralities forwarded by Frum, Boot, Kristol and others.
There are very few people in this community who quote Trump critiques by Frum, Boot, Kristol and other Republicans who have had the scales fall from their eyes. It’s a bit of a straw man you’ve set up there.
While it’s helpful to see people from the Republican base speak out forcefully against the Trump Administration and the behaviors of Republican Party legislators, I don’t view them as members of our movement. I also don’t think we “need” them to beat Trump and this toxic movement.
However, as long as there’s a portion of the purported left which continues to place as Priority #1 attacks on Democratic Party leaders which are intended to berate and not intended to persuade other Democrats, and continues to place as a lower priority holding the Trump Administration and Republican Party legislators accountable, the bipartisan rhetorical help provided by people like Frum, Boot, and Kristol will be more consequential than it would be if we had a more unified movement on our side.
That Naomi Klein column from the day after the 2016 election has aged extremely poorly. Klein has been a valuable chronicler and interpreter, but I hope you agree with me that no one is immune from critique. For one of many examples, she credits WikiLeaks for “airing the laundry” in that column. That’s not what Julian Assange was doing with WikiLeaks. For fuck’s sake, Assange was secretly communicating with the Trump campaign. Unfortunately, a disappointingly large number of progressives decided to plaster the scales onto their own eyes, and some have decided to continue to do so.
Good ad hominem at Naomi Klein, but there’s a reason the ad hominem attack is classified as a fallacy. Nor was that the main point of her column, it was a detail. An embarrassing detail, perhaps.
Klein, of course, had no idea at that time that Assange was in contact with the Trump campaign, nor did any of us. But the contents of those leaks, if you will recall, contained sufficient truth to get Debbie Wasserman Schultz summarily booted, and were later strongly substantiated (in an admittedly self-serving book) by her acting successor Donna Brazile.
Leaked or confessional information can come from evilly-motivated or self-serving people, but that doesn’t automatically mean the information itself isn’t true. Assessing the source is only the FIRST STEP in assessing the verity of what the source says.
You mention “many [other] examples” in Klein’s piece, but the reason I linked to it was her point that “It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump.” Apparently defending that position is tantamount to participating in a circular firing squad.
Again, I wasn’t the one that even brought it up. But I won’t sit idly by when I see one of the most important problems of not only American but world affairs being trashed as if nonexistent, on a blog that’s supposed to stand for intelligent discussion.
I could see during the 2016 campaign that Assange was using WikiLeaks to act in bad faith. Selectively highlighting the emails, demagoguing the fuck out of those, highlighting the further demagoguing of them by others, burying the emails which displayed Democratic Party and Clinton campaign leaders acting with strong ethics, not seriously seeking out emails from Republican and Clinton campaign leaders, saying preposterously incendiary things about Clinton (“a demon that is going to put nooses around everyone’s necks”, etc.), all while saying Trump may be distasteful but may change the paradigm, and on and on.
Klein also showed herself remarkably untroubled by the FBI’s major and unprecedented interference in the election over nothing. She made against evidence the claim that Comey’s multiple interventions were not decisive. She utterly failed to account for the fact that the Clinton campaign platform was the most thorough, detailed across-the-board progressive platform in viable modern general election Presidential campaign history.
And this isn’t something I’m going to accept:
“It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump.”
My enthusiastic support of Hillary in the general election doesn’t mean I was enbracing the worst aspects of Democratic Party policy pursuits in the last 30 years. That’s some motherfucking horseshit right there. It just means I wasn’t interested in going through what we’re going through with the current Administration and Republican Congress, which is absolutely predictably dozens of times worse than anything unified Democratic Party governance has brought. That’s a truth that Klein wants to walk away from. It greatly handicaps her as a political analyst, and it hurts the movement she wants to help.
edit: “…not seriously seeking out emails from Republican and Trump campaign leaders…”.
The statement “”It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump” does not refer primarily to the people who voted for Hillary. It applies to the people who did NOT vote for Hillary, to explain WHY they did not.
As Klein says somewhere, Trump did not win the election, Clinton lost it.
The bone of contention between us is this: Many Democrats want to believe that it was the fault of extreme lefties, Sanders supporters and other malcontents, that Hillary did not win. That’s not true. It was the fault of the Democratic Party itself, and Hillary Clinton herself. Millions of Democrats, myself included, who were lukewarm or less on Hillary during the primaries, voted for her if only to prevent Trump for winning. But too many stayed home or voted for Trump. As far as they were concerned, Hillary & the Democrats were not offering them a way forward.
You don’t have to explain to me or anyone else here that Trump was not either. You have to explain it to those who voted for Trump.
You are not going to find such people commenting on this blog. You are going to find them in working-class neighborhoods economically hard-hit areas of the country like Ohio and Michigan.
Nor did these problems with the Democratic Party suddenly appear for this election. They had been brewing for decades, and we’ve been seeing their effects for decades. In 2016 they reached critical mass. It was the wrong time to be offering the same old same old. Don’t blame it on me and many others for recognizing this.
How do you square the claim “It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump” with my claim that “the Clinton campaign platform was the most thorough, detailed across-the-board progressive platform in viable modern general election Presidential campaign history”?
The majority of people in working-class neighborhoods in economically hard-hit areas of Ohio, Michigan and elsewhere voted for Clinton. In the States with the closest margins for Trump, the working-class neighborhoods which went for Orange Mussolini were the extremely white neighborhoods.
The critique offered here asks us to ignore the fact that the demographic groups most economically disadvantaged, lower- and middle-income non-whites, voted overwhelmingly for Hillary, and that it was wealthy white people who gave Trump his biggest margins. It seems unwise to ignore those things.
It also seems unwise for our movement to ignore the FBI’s major and unprecedented interference in the election over nothing. It seems unwise to make against evidence the claim that Comey’s multiple interventions were not decisive. It seems unwise to display indifference over the roles taken by Assange/Wikileaks and Russia/Putin. It seems unwise to ignore the fact that each and every State which gave Trump razor-thin wins were States which installed major voter suppression laws in the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. It seems unwise to evade the fact that every single Supreme Court Justice nominated by Presidents Clinton and Obama voted to uphold the VRA.
It seems unwise to ignore the fact that every single one of these factors would have worked against Senator Sanders if he had won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016, as they worked against the candidacies of Senate candidates like Russ Feingold. It’s rather hard to associate candidates like Feingold with the elastically pejorative adjective “neoliberalism”. Yet he and other liberal candidates went down as well, while those who satisfied people asking for an even purer liberalism gained almost no support at all. We have no helpful explanation from Klein or anyone else why candidates with purer progressive platforms and backgrounds remained so unpopular with the voters in 2016.
Many of the challenges which confront the progressive movement are different from the ones hammered on by Klein. Klein’s writings attempt to grapple honestly with policy outcomes while doing a lousy job grappling honestly with electoral outcomes.
There are many liberals who think Hillary’s campaign made shabby excuses for their electoral failure in 2016. There are as many or more liberals who think Bernie’s campaign made shabby and extremely damaging and consequential excuses for their much more substantial electoral failure in 2016.
I believe the challenges we face together would not be met by tossing aside everyone associated with the DNC/Clinton/Pelosi/Schumer/et al. We all have to own what happened in 2016 so we can determine the best path forward together, and we have to tell the truth about the platform Hillary campaigned on, which was largely ignored by leftists and centrists and rightists alike. They had a demagogued woman to hate on, and they did so.
How do you square the statement that “the Clinton campaign platform was the most thorough, detailed across-the-board progressive platform in viable modern general election Presidential campaign history” with the fact that Clinton’s economic policies are similar to those of Thatcher and Reagan?
That is a question I myself have been asking for months. The answer is simple. Clinton’s progressivism ia a hollow sham of progressivism. I don’t care if you call it the most progressive platform evah. And of course the people you refer to voted for her. Because the only other choice was Trump. Personally, the word “progressive” doesn’t even exist in my vocabulary because it’s been so fucking co-opted.
I’m going to tell you something. I don’t even care about Hillary, because she’s pretty much history. But I live in NYC, and Bill DeBlasio, who’s way more “progressive” than Hillary, is helping to destroy this city with great gusto. I don’t have to answer to you. There is no democracy in my own city, the real estate developers have caret blanche, they are about to destroy my neighborhood along with all the remaining affordable neighborhoods and displace many thousands of mostly poor people of color with their gentrification.
It has nothing to do with mysogyny. As lon as I’ve known them, my wife and her late mother have been far harsher in their views of Hillary Clinton than I ever was. I doubt you even know what I’m talking about because it’s not a subject that comes up here.
But no, I’m not a fan of purges. I don’t advocate tossing aside everyone associated with Clinton/Pelosi/Schumer et al. If you read my comments you will see that I have been less critical of Pelosi, and had somewhat more faith in Schumer (who by the way, was very supportive of Bernie Sanders) than probably most people on this blog.
I just hope these people have learned something. I need to see that they have.
I don’t agree that Hillary Clinton’s economic policies were similar to Reagan’s and Thatcher’s. At all.
It’s likely that your wife and mother-in-law’s harsh views of Hillary have not been motivated by misogyny. It’s also possible for women to exhibit views which support misogyny and patriarchy. We see it all the time. I think it’s unwise to ignore the misogyny that characterized much of the media’s coverage of Clinton. I think the Democratic Party should increase the number of women candidates who win Party primaries, but misogyny will continue to be a barrier to power we must overcome together.
I appreciate that you are grappling in good faith in this exchange. I’m in firm agreement that we need to fight to push many Democratic Party leaders to the left on many issues. I also agree that Clinton is done, so it would be best if Americans would drop the counterproductive, persistent proxy Clinton/Sanders fights.
Believe me, my wife and late mother in law are by no means mysogynists or victims of patriarchy. They see Hillary Clinton as a great example the SORT of woman in positions of power that made both their lives a lot more difficult. I think you know what I mean.
Clinton is done, but what she represents is unfortunately far from done in the Democratic Party. Of course it’s not limited to her, it’s just that she was so powerful in the party and “happened” to be chosen as its presidential candidate. That’s why I brought up DeBlasio, especially because, for me living in New York, it’s much easier to understand.
As to Reagan and Thatcher and Clinton, this article explains how “The Democratic Leadership Council did not offer an alternative to the neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher, but implicitly endorsed its central premises.”
Might wanna check that link again, slick.
this ought to work.
I also live in NYC. Tell me, which candidate in the recent mayoral election met your desired level of purity? And is Bernie Sanders now a neoliberal, neo-centrist sellout for endorsing AND swearing in DiBlasio (the horror)?
All the activists in my neighborhood supported Sal Albanese, who primaried DB and then ran on the Reform ticket as his only viable option. In both he got 15% of the vote.
It was not about purity, it was about survival. We especially appreciated Albanese’s pledge to “basically scrap all of the mayor’s rezoning proposals,” which are being inflicted almost exclusively on working-class, majority-minority neighborhoods like mine. Evidently you don’t live in that kind of a neighborhood.
I’ve lived in NYC since the mid-90s. DiBlasio is by far the best mayor we’ve had over that time period. If you want to dump him because he’s too close to developers, fine. But the alternative better have a more coherent plan than “do away with the mayor’s rezoning proposals.” Because that’s not a plan, and affordable housing (or lack thereof) has long been a problem here. It’s partly why I have an arduous commute every morning.
And focusing solely on the development issue overlooks all the good things he’s done that impact a lot of middle-low income people like free pre-k, paid sick days, expanding the FMLA, and stopping stop and frisk.
Like I said, you obviously don’t live in my (or 14 other) neighborhoods slated for rezoning. You’re entitled to your opinion.
After 12 years of Bloomberg we needed a lot better than De Blasio.
Your ad-hominem is showing. I can’t possibly live in one of the nabes slated for rezoning because I don’t share your same opinion? That’s pretty dumb. You must not have kids or have to take sick time from work or you must not have to fear being stopped by the cops for being black, because you obviously don’t think those issues are worthy enough.
No, it’s not because you’re against them. it’s because you don’t know anything about them.
. . . The Shock Doctrine is a foundational text for anyone purporting to be “progressive”, “liberal” . . . hell, even “center-left”/”centrist”.
(You have read it before weighing in in this fashion . . . right?)
I haven’t read the column you reference. But then again, you didn’t link it. So there’s that.
○ Naomi Klein on the US Elections, the Democratic Party, and What the Movement Does Next | The Real News – June 20, 2016 |
The Bernie Sanders campaign has shown that “a progressive majority in the United States is within grasp” and could play a major role in the next election cycle, said Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
“What do we do with this energy that now reveals that actually, a progressive majority in the United States is within grasp?” said Klein. “I mean, this is a shattering of the neoliberal consensus. We’ve been told for so long that the left could never win in the United States, and here you have a candidate who’s a self-described democratic socialist, never walks that back. The more he spoke openly about seemingly radical ideas like free, free education and so on, free college education, the bigger the crowds became,” said Klein.
“On the other hand, what the Sanders campaign has shown is that a lot of what we told ourselves on the left is not true,” Klein said.
○ It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump | The Guardian Opinion – Nov. 9, 2016 |
○ Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more | The Guardian Opinion – Nov. 10, 2016 |
Compare the state of affairs in today’s Democratic Party and Jeromy Corbyn’s Labour party …
○ The latest victory for Corbynites creates a conqueror’s dilemma
this paper by Thorsen and Lie. This is the non-paywall version. Thorsen would shortly complete his doctoral thesis on neoliberalism, and this work provided some of the basis for his doctoral work, as I understand it (I have not read his doctoral thesis as of this time). This paper seems to get cited quite a bit if Google Scholar is any indication, and the references at the end of the paper should give anyone interested a running start if they wish to delve into the scholarly research on the topic. The service Thorsen provides is his effort to come up with a neutral definition for a term that has, for better or (more likely worse) become highly emotionally loaded. I highly recommend this paper, as Thorsen appears to be asking the right questions and appears fairly skeptical of the critical literature on the phenomenon.
One of the better critical books on the topic is David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. As the title suggests, it’s a quick read, and unlike a lot of academic writers, Harvey goes out of his way to be readable. Then again, David Harvey is a scholar who is perhaps as close to being the Carl Sagan of Das Kapital as any Marxist scholar might be (he actually posted a series of lectures on YouTube breaking down that complex tome into something more digestible). But I digress. You don’t have to be a Marxist to get something out of Harvey’s book, and as far as I’m concerned it might actually help if one is not. Thankfully, his intention appears to have been to write a scholarly book for a relatively broad audience. Keep in mind that he’s a Geographer by training, so his book is organized around very geographic framework.
I’d start with Thorsen first, though, and then work backwards from there. Hopefully this particular comment is helpful to a few folks on this blog who have a genuine interest in the theory.
. . . to me?
Since it clearly isn’t “That Naomi Klein column from the day after the 2016 election [which, cfdj declared] has aged extremely poorly.”
Nothing else. You brought up Naomi Klein, and I am familiar with The Shock Doctrine, which was, you might say, my introduction to neoliberalism as a concept about a decade ago when everything was clearly going sideways during the waning days of the GWB administration. As a journalist and polemicist, Klein is generally okay enough, and she makes some effort to source her substantive statements. Your comment struck me as a good one to piggy-back off of and to offer some suggested reading for those wanting to dig deeper beyond Klein. That’s all. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I really should have just done a stand-alone diary and expanded a bit on the comment I left as a reply in your thread. I might do that at some point, although unlikely until much later this week (or more realistically later this month) as I am going to be a bit pressed for time.
Well, don’t expect the Republicans to do anything. Not gonna happen, either at the Executive level or in the Repub Congress.
That’s my assessment, at least.
I would estimate that it’s ten times less likely than having the big earthquake come and drop all of California into the Pacific.
Of course not. Trump may be incompetent but the GOP Congress (both houses) has demonstrated its incompetence and extremism that will definitely cause yet more disaster for the country (socially, economically and environmentally). They really don’t care at this point. It’s almost a kind of Gotterdammerung, we know we’re going to lose so let’s go full speed ahead in nihilism.
Wolff’s book may be a tipping point because it exposes the rot from the head down, and shows the vast amount of covering up and pacifying and lies that have all taken place during this horrific administration’s term. The Republicans kept propping Trump up so they could achieve their personal agendas because he is a useful tool/fool who creates distractions from their dishonorable goals.
I don’t know if this all comes to the removal of Trump or not. They would lose face and probably votes if they remove him, but at this rate, they’re going to lose votes anyway.
They didn’t ask for Trump but they got him and they caved and caved until they owned him. Every voice of dissent against him from the Republicans was silenced and they all jumped on the bandwagon, reluctantly or not.
And now they are running out of cover. The truths are coming out and hopefully we’ll see the Russian’s hands in all of it and Trump’s personal inadequacies and his family’s corruption. And the Republicans will own all of it.
Let them all go down in flames.
I so agree with this – in parenting this is “natural consequences”.
However – I see this is a moment of incredible danger to us. This is the moment when powerful empires are overthrown. Dawdle at our peril.
I agree, but with one exception. They most certainly asked for Trump, with every dog whistle, with every lie they have told, with every irresponsible thing they investigated while not investigating what they should have.
Trump is merely the logical extension of the Republican party. Don’t let them tell you any different. They are liars, all.
The book is only the start. When Wolff releases the tapes how does anyone in the WH keep their job? If it is just the donald in the WH the cabinet will have to step up and do something.
What amazes me is that of all the wrecking balls to hit Trump, this one–or one like it–was completely not on my radar as far back as, oh, Tuesday. Now it’s huge. But before then, in that bygone era, there were other wrecking balls to keep my eye on. Suddenly … this.
Everything is accelerated.
This is nothing new, Steggies. The neocentrisr controllers have run it up the flagpole to see who salutes numerous times. Bannon was publicly worrying about it in early fall. They are just now getting around to adding it big time to the media arsenal which is trained on Trump 24/7 and has been so since the day it became apparent that he was going to be nominated. Wolff’s book release is just another piece in the media puzzle. “Convenient release” might be a better way to describe about the book’s publicity trajectory, but whether it was planned this way or just happenstance, they are taking care to use it to emphasize yet another argument against Trump’s continuing presidency.
Drip, drip, drip…
The Trump presidency is undergoing the death of a thousand drips.
AG
P.S. You will also hear various leftinesses whining about how bad it will be no matter who succeeds him. I will bet you one thing for sure…whoever it is will have pledged serious feasance to the PermaGov. No more trying to take down the federal structure. Trump has come too close to successfully doing that already.
The center will hold for yet a while longer.
Watch.
AG
I’m hugely impressed by the planning. Henry Holt did a tremendous job. It’s almost as if they’re not even in publishing.
And of course it will be bad no matter who succeeds him! (Also of course, whomever it is will have pledged themselves to the PermaGov which is, if I understand correctly, a term describing ‘the cultural and institutional norms of US democracy and dominance, warts and all?’)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
The centre will hold for yet a while longer,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence bets on it …
(Okay, I’ll stick to prose.)
I am not sure what to make of the following phrase:
Do you not understand that almost every aspect of the major media…including publishing houses….was infiltrated by the CIA during the “Operation Mockingbird” years? This is not even conjecture…the history is out there ready to be read and understood. Do you think that Bezos’s lowball bid and subsequent buy of the Washingtoon Post…followed by massive contracts from the CIA to Amazon…wasn’t a setup?
Or…are you just being…witty. If so, I apologize. Like I said, am not sure what to make of this.
You tell me.
AG
No, no. Not being witty. Publishers may be fully-owned subsidiaries of the CIA, but they’re still notorious for not having a single clue how to sell books. Actually, the roll-out of this book should be Exhibit One in any assertion that Another Hand was involved.
Except the CIA is massively hapless, too. Hell, if they are part of a covert operation to stop Trump, they’re even ballsing that up–and that’s after they failed to usher PermaGov Clinton into office over the wild flailings of a ravening grotesque.
Our villains suck. Ever since the attempted burglary of the McCallister house over Christmas, the Deep State’s just gone from failure to failure.
(Oh, and happy new year!)
You write:
Oh.
OK.
Thank you.
I concur.
Sorry…attacked too often with hits below the belt here. Maybe a little paranoid? But deserved.
AG
There will surely be a light bulb moment within the WH circle that invoking the 25th is the best move to protect themselves from going down with Trump.
They are all snakes – look, Mr Trump or his lackeys picked them. This is a prisoner’s dilemma variant – there is advantage to the one who sells out the other 25th Amendment conspirators to the boss.
The only one who’s immune is Mr Pence. The others can be hanged.
The president would have to get to complete unconsciousness before this 25th Amendment procedure could happen.
The other variant I think is possible is a coup – a core group takes over, does the 25th amendment protocol, and then disposes of the untrustworthy cabinet members and the Trump family. Pretty nasty I, Claudius stuff. Possible but very unlikely.
What continues to astound me is how every single bit of this was totally available throughout 2016 — and, for decades before this — to anyone who cared to look (or, especially, to anyone like myself who’s lived in New York City for the past few decades).
All that crazy “vetting” that plagued Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama and Clinton (none of which ever turned up anything except totally innocuous or even heroic past deeds) was totally suspended in Trump’s case — it was like the world press and the other candidates were powerless to expose any of Trump’s super-obvious disqualifications…or, that nobody seemed to care (certainly on the Republican side, once he was nominated).
This is the part we’ll have to try to explain to our grandchildren…who will be just as baffled as we are when we look at Hitler’s rise to power. (Yes, I said “Hitler,” H-I-T-L-E-R — I have become totally anti-Godwin in the past two or three years.)
dubya’s before that.
P.S. your (our) beef isn’t really with Godwin (who has in fact endorsed Trump-Hitler comparisons), but with those who misrepresent what he actually did say as “Godwin’s Law” (he’s disavowed that interpretation). I linked to it in a comment here once, but to lazy/busy to try and find it again. Might try wikipedia if curious.
Thanks for the correction! I appreciate it.
If I wanted to be excessively didactic I would argue that I’m using “Godwin” as a synecdoche for the whole internet phenomenon — meaning, I’m not referring to the man himself — but that’s splitting hairs. Of course you’re right.
I’m pleased with myself because I was out here in front of everyone, way back in July 2015 (and received the most web and facebook traffic I’ve ever gotten) with these two essays:
Trump is Hitler
Trump is Hitler (Part II)
Excellent analyses; but you must read this prediction and weep:
Trump will be removed by the republicans only after he has exhausted his usefulness to them, I.e. only after the last pocket has been picked clean.
“There’s not much more that the media can do”…well, we have to remember that there is an entirely different media universe that 40% of our population lives in. How is it playing there?
We’ll see if this pierces the bubble. Right now, Trump’s approval rating is 38.5%…essentially unchanged since May. Until that number starts going down, we’re not going to see any 25th amendment solutions.
From the snippets I have seen from this book, the even bigger concern for me right now is how unqualified all the rest of the people in the White House are to do their jobs. Truly competent people might be able to mitigate a lot of the problems stemming from DT’s lack of fitness. The best they’ve been able to do is plugs some leaks.
The top down dysfunction, and the enabling GOP/Congress are beyond description at this point.
Everybody’s just grabbing everything they can before the music stops- Congressional Republicans on down to the lowliest grifter in the White House.
I know it’s a cliche but it’s still true that the fish rots from the head down. Trump either picked or enabled the picking of the WH staff that works for him. Many otherwise qualified Republicans refuse to work for him because he is radioactive. Meanwhile, in the Congress the NeverTrumper GOP disappeared the moment he was elected and their craven fawning and open corruption has put the democratic republic in its current mortal danger.
Better we should sit in the glowing ruins of a once-mighty republic than allow the three-letter agencies of the Deep-State/PermaGov choose and remove our leaders. It was a thoroughly corrupt, capitalist republic anyways.
And besides, Trump is just penance for Mossadegh and Diem and all the monkeying around we’ve done with other countries’ government.
So the truly progressive thing to do is sit down, shut up, and put on our sackcloth-and-ashes.
The only Real Progressives are the ones who prioritize wholesale attacks on the Democratic Party over a willingness to follow the Russia/Trump investigation in good faith.
The most trustworthy progressives of all are the ones who join the Trump Administration and the Republican Party in calling the investigation a conspiracy by Democratic Party leaders to prevent the Revolution which would put Pelosi, Schumer, Perez and other Dem Party leaders in sackcloth and ashes.
They got their tax cut. He’s expendable now.
This is the way it has to happen. The ideal workout for the Republicans is making the Democrats responsible for Mr Trump’s impeachment and conviction. (All d’s plus a few sacrifice r’s vote.)
The Democrats will figure, or have already figured out that this is what’s going down, and should not cooperate.
The problem here is that it has to be nearly unanimous and bipartisan. This is not going to be easy.
The GOP is responding with this: “Republican Senators Recommend Charges Against Author of Trump Dossier”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/us/politics/christopher-steele-dossier-judiciary-committee.html?h
p&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&
amp;region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Yep…entirely different media universe the Rs live in.
In their world, the scandal is the Steele Dossier, which as far as I can tell is the new Benghazi.
Of course he can read. He reads a teleprompter just fine.
And Joe f-ing Scarborough is one of the Cable TV fluffers who thought Trump was just fine when he was calling in every morning and boosting ratings.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/morning-blow-how-joe-and-mika-became-trumps-lapdogs-20160
223
Thank you, Bloix!!!
The short memories and sheer clickbait-sucker “opinions” of so many leftinesses are woefully amazing.
“CAN’T READ!!!???
Duh!!!
Doesn’t like to read? Is not primarily a print-learner?
Probably.
And Scarborough?
He’s been on the hustle for so long that leftinesses starved for media attention forget which hustles made him famous. They’re the same ones who started fawning all over John McCain…the man who gave us Sarah Palin as a serious vice-presidential candidate…when it became plain that he does not support Trump.
Of course he doesn’t support Trump!!! He’s been a neocentrist (the neocon division thereof) his entire DC swamp career.
Lord!!!
What fools these mortals be.
Later…
AG
Too many Republicans find treason and criminality more congenial than granting Democrats accuracy on anything.
The did in the Nixon administration as well.
The danger for Democrats is when they are tempted to do similarly. The problem with the past decade plus is that that has not been the temptation of the search for bipartisanship.
Wolff’s book has given political cover for some members of the chattering classes such as Scarborough to split from Trump. That’s good as far as it goes, but none of these have an power. They do nothing but talk.
You wave this around as though there were some possibility that it would happen. Can you explain what you’re seeing, that I’m not? Because the gang that’s running the country right now has given up on the last shred of concern for good governance, under any definition of that word. What we have now is a warlord government; Trump is the top warlord and his cabinet are all minor warlords. Like warlords everywhere, their main goal is to steal everything that is not nailed down, and destroy the rest. You may see them quit if they perceive that the roof is about to fall in but you won’t see them move against Trump. Why would they add to the risk they’re facing by taking on that one? Their only interest is self-interest.
The “people in a position to solve this problem” are our Representatives and Senators. Among them, the ones who can see the handwriting on the wall are objecting by… quitting. This narrows the support for Trump, but it also consolidates it relatively among the bolder set who hang on, grabbing all they can get.
Impeachment starts in the House. That means that:
Impeachment ends in the Senate, with conviction => removal from office. This has never succeeded (it
requires a 2/3 majority).
Is there a value to an impeachment without a removal from office? Recent past suggests not.
Are you young?
Perhaps Nixon doesn’t qualify as “recent” in your universe?
Though in his case, the certain knowledge that he was about to be impeached sufficed.
Yes.
The case for Trump’s removal has been made.
Again.
This time by a nasty little book hustler, his Big Boy publisher and the whole rotted-out, corporate-owned and controlled mass media.
I trust Wolff…just another carrion eater at best…no more than I do Trump. We desperately lurch from villain to villain, looking for a hero. Instead we get progressively smaller and smaller villains.
So far? With the exception of Bernie Sanders, who your beloved DemocRatic Party so efficiently disappeared during the primaries? No heroes. At best, we get career
BureauRats…errr, ahhh, I mean bureaucrats…like Comey and Mueller, both of whom have played the DC swamp game to near perfection for decades. Big rodents using smaller rodents like Wolff to undermine today’s king rodent, Donald J. Trump.I am sick of the whole game.
Damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
Fucked.
So it goes.
AG
P.S. In a war between and/or among several rat packs, there is only one possible outcome. Rats will be the winners.
Choose your rat pack?
I’d rather not.
AG
People will trust and follow a personality rather than an institution.
The statement “”It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump” does not refer primarily to the people who voted for Hillary. It applies to the people who did not vote for Hillary, to explain why they did not.
The bone of contention between us is this. Many Democrats want to believe that it was the fault of extreme lefties, Sanders supporters and other malcontents, that Hillary did not win. That’s not true. It was the fault of the Democratic Party itself, and Hillary Clinton herself. Millions of Democrats, myself included, who were lukewarm or less on Hillary during the primaries, voted for her if only to prevent Trump for winning. But too many stayed home or voted for Trump. As far as they were concerned, Hillary & the Democrats were not offering them a way forward.
You don’t have to explain to me or anyone else here that Trump was not either. You have to explain it to those who voted for Trump.
You are not going to find such people commenting on this blog. You are going to find them in working-class neighborhoods economically hard-hit areas of the country like Ohio and Michigan.